Blizzard’s Mea Culpa to Diablo 3 Fans

I would have to imagine that this has been one of the worst weeks ever for Blizzard. Their wildly popular Diablo III title released with a myriad of game breaking issues that more or less prevented gamers from playing it on launch day. To top that off some of the promised features have been disabled for now such as the in-game auction house. If the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle is any clue to how rabid angry gamers can get, then you should have a vivid idea of the backlash that Blizzard has received this week from some raging D3 fans.

Unlike the ME3 ending backlash I can actually understand why D3 gamers are so upset over the launch day issues that still plague some of them two days later. Blizzard essentially sold us a faulty service. If there infrastructure wasn’t ready to handle the global rush of gamers trying to play this game on its launch day then they shouldn’t have released the game yet. You can’t tell me that they didn’t know that this game was going to sell like hotcakes. They had over 2 million pre-orders, and if that is not an indication as to what your game’s launch day will bring I don’t know what is. This issue was compounded due to the fact that Blizzard went with an odd DRM model, which requires an “Always-on” Internet connection to play, and that includes the single player mode as well.

I’ll give them credit though, at least they’ve worked tirelessly to get the D3 servers back into working order. They’ve also issued a heartfelt apology to all of their fans. I’m not as heartbroken over all of these issues as some of you may be, because I’m not that huge of a PC gamer anyway, so this was my first foray into a launch day event for a computer game. If anything I learned that I definitely prefer console gaming. Those games have their issues too, but not to the point where the entire game can’t even be played. You can read Blizzard’s full apology below. You’ve been thinking that with all of its issues Diablo 3 is still going to be a blast…

Blizzard’s Mea Culpa

Diablo Players:

We’d like to extend a very sincere thank you to everyone who joined the global Diablo III launch celebrations this week, as well as to everyone who was ready to jump into Sanctuary the moment the game went live.

To that end, we’d also like to say that we’ve been humbled by your enthusiasm — and we sincerely regret that your crusade to bring down the Lord of Terror was thwarted not by mobs of demons, but by mortal infrastructure. As many of you are aware, technical issues occurring within hours after the game’s launch led to players experiencing error messages and difficulty logging in. These issues cropped up again last night for the Americas and Europe servers. Despite very aggressive projections, our preparations for the launch of the game did not go far enough.

We’ve been monitoring the game 24/7 and have applied several optimizations to help our systems better weather the global rush. As of late last night, specifically 11:50 PM PDT on May 15, all systems have been online and running relatively smoothly. We’re continuing to monitor performance globally and will be taking further measures as needed to ensure a positive experience for everyone. This includes some maintenance to implement additional improvements for each region.

In order to make sure everything is continuing to run as it should, we’ve decided to move out our target launch for the real-money auction house beyond our original estimated date of May 22. We’ll post further updates on that in the near future.

Aside from the tremendous number of players simultaneously logging in to the game, one of the launch-day service issues was linked to the achievement system. Some players began to notice early on that achievements were either not being earned properly, or not being saved between multiple logins. We’re investigating this issue and will provide a specific update as soon as possible.

We greatly appreciate everyone’s support, and we want to sincerely apologize for the difficulties many of you encountered on day one. Please visit the Battle.net Support site or Support forums for the latest service-related updates or for help in troubleshooting any technical issues you may be having downloading, installing, or while playing the game.

Thank you again for your patience while we reinforce the gates of Sanctuary and further strengthen it for your onslaught.

Matt Heywood is the founder and EIC of EntertainmentBuddha.com where he strives to make you a better geek, one post at a time! When he’s not scouring the Internet for interesting nuggets of awesomeness he can be found in his secret lair enjoying the latest and greatest video games, taking pictures of toys, or talking Star Wars on EB’s Star Wars Time podcast show.

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